SO NOW, we know: Nothing can be allowed to hinder the abortion-rights tyranny.

Not the Constitution, not the will of state legislatures, not expert medical opinion, not the viability of the unborn child outside the womb.

Not reason, not fairness, not the gruesome specter of infanticide.

Let there be no illusion in the pro-life ranks: with the Stenberg vs. Carhart ruling, the game is over – for now.

“This ties up all the knots, and finishes what was begun with Roe vs. Wade. Nothing can be done,” conceded Amherst College law Professor Hadley Arkes, an influential pro-life intellectual who was present in the courtroom for the decision.

And in a parallel ruling that should – but won’t – provoke outrage from civil libertarians, the court found that there is no constitutional right to peaceful pro-life speech on sidewalks outside abortion clinics.

The extremism of the court’s decisions can hardly be overstated, and was explicitly noted in blistering dissents by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Nothing those worthy jurists said, though, is more affecting than the plain words spoken before Congress by Brenda Pratt Shafer, a nurse who witnessed the procedure legalized by the high court:

“The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

“The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.”

Hold that image in your mind for a few seconds, and understand that this is what a court majority, including Republican appointees Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan) and David Souter (Bush), insists is sanctioned by the Constitution.

The Stenberg decision was not much of a surprise. Scalia tartly noted “the court’s inclination to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.”

In his dissenting Stenberg opinion, Thomas said that even if one accepted the court’s 1992 Casey ruling and its prohibition against placing an “undue burden” on women seeking abortion, the Nebraska ban was still licit.

No doubt keeping in mind the American Medical Association’s statement that the partial-birth procedure is never necessary, Thomas wrote, “More medically sophisticated minds than ours have searched and failed to identify a single circumstance (let alone a large fraction) in which partial-birth abortion is required.”

This radically pro-abortion court also yesterday upheld the state of Colorado’s decision to abrogate the First Amendment rights of pro-life protesters outside abortion clinics.

In Colorado, pro-lifers who come without permission within eight feet of someone near an abortion clinic entrance with the intention of speaking against abortion are breaking the law.

“I have no doubt that this regulation would be deemed content-based in an instant if the case before us involved antiwar protesters, or union members seeking to ‘educate’ the public about the reasons for their strike,” wrote Scalia.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, affirmed the right of citizens in public places to avoid “unwanted communication.”

That logic would have been comforting to the white bigots of the Jim Crow South, who surely didn’t want to their consciences challenged by civil-rights protesters outside segregated lunch counters.

So what now? Arkes has drafted a bill, which has been introduced in the House by Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.), that would establish the right to life and medical treatment of a child born accidentally in the process of an abortion.

Incredibly, that doesn’t already exist. Even more incredibly, House Democrats are already building opposition to it.

Of the two men who would appoint the next two or three Supreme Court justices, only one agrees with a clear majority of the American people that partial-birth abortion should be a crime: George W. Bush.